Tag: David V. Matthews

My supervisor, Hank Bromley, considered himself an intellectual. An actual wooden plaque on his desk said the following, which I still remember after seven decades:

In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here.—Moby-Dick

I just knew he’d never read that novel (but then, I’d never read it either and still haven’t). As with most of the other men there (few women worked in that office, except as secretaries-slash-playthings), he preferred talking about sports and cars and cracking jokes about what everyone (including me) called “colored people.” The life of the mind interfered with life, I guess.

In this special, which of course I never saw, Paul Lynde plays an 1890s family man whose house gets invaded by wacky relatives on Christmas Eve. The special aired only once. According to more culturally-literate friends who have seen this on YouTube, Lynde delivers the campiest version of “A Visit from St. Nicholas” ever. My thirteen-year-old self in 1977—a wannabe straight boy who air-guitared to sexist crap on the radio—would’ve hated this version, and so would’ve my Aunt Inez, with whom my family still lived, and who hated what she called “silliness.” Sometimes, I can see her point.

In high school during the 2010s, Stewie Pringle played an on-line, open-world videogame called Club Foote, in which one could dance, drink, use drugs, have sex, or simply wander around aimlessly at the titular establishment. His avatar, Gadwin, resembled a tall, buff Sonic the Hedgehog. After a while, Pringle used a code he’d found in some chatroom to transform the sex scenes from ugh (nothing explicit) to hell yeah. Now as Gadwin banged an endless succession of guys hardcore-style, Pringle felt transgressive (but not transgender, no sirree, as he likes telling his fellow semi-closeted Trump Administration staffers with a laugh).

Jenkins Winthrop, from Caldune Petroleum, joined other fossil-fuel company CEOs for a meeting with the president in the Oval Office. That night, over dinner at his mansion, Winthrop told his lover—the Energy Department’s social-media representative, Stewart “Stewie” Pringle—that under Trump, the coronavirus pandemic means “fuckin’ Christmas in April” for Big Oil: gigantic tax breaks, gigantic grants, suspended EPA rules, and nothing for renewables. “What a surprise, ha ha,” Winthrop said.

“Did you practice social distancing at that meeting, ha ha?” Pringle asked.

Considering I have several Everests of unread books to tackle (someday, Christina Stead), perhaps I shouldn’t spend time hate-ish reading Maureen Dowd’s column every week. By “hate-ish,” I mean perhaps I revere MoDo for the success she’s enjoyed despite—or more likely because of—her snarky insubstantiality.

And if you want snarky insubstantiality to the extreme, dudes and dudettes, check out her latest, Dowdier-than-usual column, “A Meme Girl Mash-Up,” in today’s New York Times. The very first sentence, which mentions Tina Fey and Mean Girls, gives us Dowd’s trademark celebrity name-dropping and pop-cultural referencing. Two sentences later, Dowd opines “Politics has never been filled with so many mean girls[,]” thus displaying her misogyny; she always depicts non-masculine traits as unfavorable. However, her “bitchyyy lunch table” comprising Mitch McConnell, Rudy Guiliani, and other nasty, male and female Republicans who worship Trump the “Queen Bee” did surprise me, since she almost always disparagingly feminizes Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, who behaves either unwomanly or too womanly. Not to worry, though—Dowd soon enough designates the Democrat Mike Bloomberg as a wanna-bee.

And also not to worry, Dowd then hates on Hillary, criticizing her for, during that presidential debate, not calling out the Donald for his stalking-esque behavior (though if Hillary had called him out, do you think Dowd would have reacted favorably?). By the time Dowd notes that “Trump…is now scratching Bloomy’s eyes out[,]” the retrograde gender attitudes will make you feel like chasing a blonde, busty secretary around a desk.